Two hours stuck in a highway traffic jam. Almost two hours in a queue. Half an hour just to enter the stadium. Two hours to buy a cup of warm Coke (before the drinks ran out), crushed in a crowd of epic proportions. That was the gist of Saturday’s 5fm Coca-Cola Colab Massive Mix concert.
For months I had been excited to see first-hand why Metallica had sold so many millions of albums and why Fatboy Slim could famously draw so many people to Brighton Beach. I had bought my R350 ticket even before these names were added to the line-up; after all, the rest of the line-up, local and international, was excellent too.
I woke up on Saturday ready for a day of first-rate music. My partner and I left home a bit late; no problem, we thought, perhaps we’d miss some of the first act on the line-up, Flat Stanley. Little did we know we would be back home many hours later without having heard a single note of Enter Sandman, Unforgiven or any other Metallica hit.
The two hours of concert traffic were frustrating, but hey, maybe we should have left earlier. At Supersport Park in Centurion, parking cost the not-so-bargain price of R40 (at one parking area the guards wanted R70) before we joined the enormous queue waiting to get inside. Almost two hours later (The Finkelstiens did sound great from the street), we finally reached the woefully inadequate gates and entered the promised land of Once We Are Inside, Everything Will Be Better.
We couldn’t have been more wrong. Just to walk on to the field easily took more than 20 minutes of shoving and elbowing through a dense mass of people (it turned out that 43Â 000 mostly white rock fans had shown up). To locate our friends proved impossible — and they told us by cellphone how they had just queued for hours to buy a drink. According to Michael Anetakis, Big Concerts spokesperson, contracts with Metallica and other bands specified that all drinks had to be poured into cups, which didn’t help alleviate the problem.
Disbelievingly, we headed to the refreshments area. After much more shoving and elbowing, we reached what seemed to be four or five food stalls and one bar, with massive queues coming from far off and stretching into infinity. Of course, one wasn’t allowed to bring much beside the clothes on one’s back into the stadium or leave to buy water elsewhere and return.
Said Anetakis on Monday: “Big Concerts did not own the concession stands, and we were ensured there would be more than enough drinks.” But we soon realised that a drink and a snack would easily require another two hours of waiting; also, by that time we were feeling extremely uncomfortable and frankly unsafe in the impenetrable crush.
As much as Metallica, Fatboy Slim and the other star attractions beckoned, we were simply not prepared to brave such inhuman conditions for several more hours. I’ve been to more stadium concerts, big raves, band nights and music parties than I care to remember, and the Supersport Park fiasco felt unprecedented. The crush of people seemed coloured with greed: was this a case of overselling to battle spiralling costs, or simply promoters out to milk punters for every last cent?
According to Anetakis, a stadium capacity of 45Â 000 had been approved, but concession stands were placed in areas that were too small, for example. “It was totally unacceptable,” he said. “We have taken it up with the stadium. We may even take legal action.”
We could locate only a locked emergency exit after another 20 minutes of crowd-bashing, and it took some convincing for the surly security guard to let us out.
I sent an SMS to our friends inside to tell them we were leaving. “Good luck,” I said. The reply came: “You’re the lucky ones.” An hour or so later, after queueing again only to be told the stadium vendors had run out of soft drinks, beer and water, my friends also gave up and left.
I’m sure Metallica were awesome and Fatboy Slim was funkier than ever; I sincerely hope I will have an opportunity to see them again one day. For now, I’m R350 the poorer but happy to have emerged safe and sound from such an organisational nightmare.
Big Concerts has asked that complaints be directed to [email protected] as it is compiling a report on the problems at the concert